Cole J.

Hyatt

Professor Russick

Teachers As Writers

7 December 2023

The help I received was with where to split my paragraphs since they were a bit bulky and made
for a worse reading experience, a few rewordings of passages that just felt clunky, but mainly I
added a more bulky and substantial counter claim that directly speaks to the Stop WOKE Act. I
also cleaned up a grammar problem or two.
The Problem With Whitewashing History
The history of the United States of America is a beast in its own right. The United States
has a history of racism, slavery, and overall is not a bright history. Despite this, students in the
United States of America should learn from this dark past to continue moving forward and
making our country a better place. In spite of this our country has been trying to cover its tracks
and erase its history. This has been shown with the myriad of laws that have been used around
the United States of America to prevent students from learning the real history of the United
States of America. This erasure of the negative past typically focuses on removing the
persecution of minorities, so it is referred to as whitewashing. While some parents believe that
students should always be comfortable in the classroom, whitewashing history hurts the minority
groups whose history is being ignored.
Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, according to Lawyers Defending American Democracy, a
group of lawyers who fight to keep other lawyers and public officials accountable according to
their mission statement, “effectively prevents students from learning about brutal periods in
America’s past. The law prohibits teaching that causes students – by implication, White students
– to feel ‘personal responsibility…guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress.’” This
law argues that it is defending students and keeping them happy in schools, but history is not
pretty. Many people will argue that students should be comfortable in class and the classroom
should be comfortable, but the content does not have to be. To understand why war is horrible
one must learn of the horrors of war. This connects to our American history, our country was
built on the back of minorities and we can not ignore that, but that fact is not comfortable. A
classroom should be a place where discussion is allowed and a free amount of conversation is
possible and that can only be done by stretching out of a comfort zone. Laws like the Stop
WOKE Act simply stop a healthy classroom from existing, and they ignore the work parts of
American history.
Slavery was a horrible part of American history that was upheld by our founding fathers,
yet when a war was fought to fight it some states refuse to acknowledge what really happened.
Michael Wenger of the American Association for Colleges and Universities, a group that
promotes diversity and inclusion, states one thing that all states need to accept is that, “the Civil
War was fought precisely over slavery and not “states’ rights” or anything else.” This might
sound bizarre to someone from a state that was part of the North during the Civil War, but many
southern states still fight against the belief that what was done in the Civil War was not over
there states having a racist history. Laws like the Stop WOKE Act affect 25 states according to
Lawyers Defending American Democracy. This means that half of our states are teaching their
students a faulty version of history. This version is more palatable to a white student, but leaves
out the things that made our country what it is today and the minority groups that we built our
country off of. The Stop WOKE Act is also a great example of a law that has no end to its reach.
It has no specific targets it can remove anything that causes anguish or guilt. This is not
specific, laws like this only seek to erase not to create a better country with better teaching
practices.
The Jewish community was forever changed by the events of the Holocaust an event
that caused many Jewish families to flee from Germany and other European countries to places
like the United States of America. In spite of this Courtney Erdman of the Badger Herald, an
independent newspaper from The University of Wisconsin Madison, states that only 12 states
require the Holocaust to be taught in schools. This is not only a large part of the second world
war, a defining moment for the world and our country, but also a defining moment for a minority
group that makes up a decent portion of the United States of America’s population. This blatant
ignorance to the past that is being instilled in students can make them not be able to understand
as much and can make students from one of these minority groups feel like their voice is being
silenced.
Sadly this whitewashing is nothing new. Minorities in the United States of America have
been silenced for as long as we have been teaching in this country. Bob Peterson from
Rethinking Schools, a group dedicated to increasing inclusion in schools, discusses how
textbooks are some of the worst offenders of whitewashing. Peterson looked through a group of
textbooks looking to be bought and used for 5th graders in Milwaukee Public Schools. Not a
single one of the options brought to Peterson mentioned racism of any kind. Two never even
used the word discrimination. Reading between the lines it is clear that the omissions in these
textbooks are to make them more appealing to school districts, these textbooks are how these
twisted accounts of history are created in the first place. Without them the country could be
more educated and adopt the minority groups that have been put down in America’s past.
Part of this whitewashing is the removal of achievements for people who are part of
minorities, achievements are constantly stripped away from others and given to white men.
Coshandra Dillard from Learning for Justice, a quarterly magazine made by the Southern
Poverty Law Center, found Phebe Hayes, a woman who learned that another person had been
given the credit for being the first woman to get a medical degree in Louisiana as Dillard puts it,
“Hayes learned the story of Dr. Emma Wakefield-Paillet, the first Black woman to get a medical
degree from a Louisiana medical school and the first woman of any race. She was also the first
Black woman to open a medical practice.” Whitewashing is greater than some new laws today
fighting against students learning our country’s true past. Instead, it has been a constant war
since before any of us were alive. The Stop WOKE Act is simply one of the latest blows in the
fight to keep minorities with their achievements and their histories no matter how bad it makes
our country seem.
We have all heard of the fact that history is learned so we can learn not to make the
same mistakes in the past. In the United States of America’s past minority groups were ignored
and abused for our country’s gain. We make talk of being a melting pot, but these laws stopping
the teaching of history teach one thing. That we should not learn that discarding minority groups
is wrong instead we should continue ignoring them. Everyday the United States has more and
more people of minority groups. These blatant efforts to ignore their history to make the white
man look better are an effort to make the white man feel better. History is not meant to be easy
to hear, it is meant to make us know that we can be better than our forefathers that we hold in
such high regard. We can make this country a place where history is truly taught and minorities
are not discarded with our vote. We can no longer tolerate the people in congress who push for
whitewashed history or our school districts that use whitewashed textbooks. We need to make
our voices heard and once and for all end whitewashing in the United States of America so that
the minority groups hurt by it are hurt no more.

Works Cited

Dillard, Coshandra. “What Is Our Collective Responsibility When We Uncover Honest

History?” Learning for Justice, Southern Poverty Law Center, 2023,
www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/fall-2023/what-is-our-collective-responsibility-
when-we-uncover-honest-history.

Erdman, Courtney. “History in Its Entirety: How Whitewashed History Education Leaves
Much of History, Students Out.” The Badger Herald, 5 Apr. 2021,
badgerherald.com/features/2021/04/05/history-in-its-entirety-how-whitewashed-history-
education-leave-much-of-history-students-out/.

Lawyers Defending American Democracy. “Whitewashing History.” LDAD, Lawyers

Defending American Democracy, 10 Aug. 2023, ldad.org/letters-briefs/whitewashing-
history.

Peterson, Bob. “Whitewashing the Past.” Rethinking Schools, Rethinking Schools, 17

Nov. 2022, rethinkingschools.org/articles/whitewashing-the-past/.

Wenger, Michael R. “The Dangers of Teaching Whitewashed American History.”

AAC&U, 16 Feb. 2023, www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/articles/the-dangers-of-teaching-
whitewashed-american-history.